Myanmar's Transition Research Articles

Konstitusi Myanmar Tahun 2008: Pembagian Kekuasaan Antara Sipil-Militer pada Masa Pemerintahan Sipil Usdp (2011-2016) & Nld (2016-2021) di Myanmar

This study aims to analyze civil-military relations during the USDP and NLD governments, as well as analyze the democratic transition in Myanmar that led to the division of power during the civilian rule. This research was conducted using qualitative research methods. That is, a method that is used by providing an overview of the problem being discussed by arranging the facts in such a way that it forms a configuration of the problem that can be understood clearly. This approach has an assumption by seeing social reality as an ever-changing condition and is the result of social construction between actors and social institutions. As a result, under the 2008 Constitution, the military in Myanmar remains dominant in security and defense with 25% of legislative seats reserved for the Tatmadaw. This division of power is unequal, resulting in military dominance, as the democratic transition is controlled by the military through a "seven-step roadmap to democracy," without the significant role of the NLD. Civilian control over the military during the 2011-2021 civilian rule was not achieved, with the military having sovereign authority in top-down policies and weak political representation.

Forging the nation: land struggles in Myanmar's transition period

Forging the nation: land struggles in Myanmar's transition period

Failure of Myanmar's Democratic Transition

Myanmar is one of the countries that carried out military coups several times from 1962 to 2021. Although known as an authoritative ruler, the military junta has carried out more democratic policies, such as opening space for press freedom and holding Myanmar‘s election which allowed the participation of a pro-democratic party namely the NLD Party. However, the military junta suddenly staged a military coup in 2021. In previous years, Myanmar's military junta attempted to make a democratic transition. This raises the question of what factors caused the democratic transition in Myanmar to fail, despite previous positive results. The phenomenon of democratic transition in Myanmar will be analyzed using democratic transition theory, democratization theory, and the concept of civil-military relations. This study uses an approach-explanation approach to determine the failure factors of the democratic transition in Myanmar. Based on the theories, concepts, and research methods used, the failure of the democratic transition in Myanmar occurred due to four factors: The first factor is the democratic transition in Myanmar using the top-down path. The second factor is that the transition is not followed by the installation of democracy. The third factor is that the civil-military relations in Myanmar are included in the category of unbalanced civilian accommodation. The fourth factor, the military afraid of Aung San Suu Kyi succeeded in amending the 2008 constitution which will remove military privileges.

Determining Factors of People's Participation in the Community Forest Program in the Central Dry Zone during the Rural Livelihood Transition in Myanmar

Determining Factors of People's Participation in the Community Forest Program in the Central Dry Zone during the Rural Livelihood Transition in Myanmar

Royal, colonial and authoritarian legacies in Myanmar prisons of today

This article traces inconsistencies and consistencies of penal practices in Myanmar from dynastic times until today. With inspiration from Foucault's history of the present and Holland and Lave's history in practice, the article demonstrates how penal practices are shaped by legacies of the past. Additionally, the study shows how the continued use of practices from authoritarian times revealed the weakness of the democratic transition in Myanmar. To do so, three practices are studied through interviews with former prisoners conducted during long-term ethnographic fieldwork. These are the use of convict officers, amnesties and torture. These practices are described in first-hand accounts by former prisoners and traced back through time by comparison with existing research on penal histories in Myanmar. This tracing reveals that some practices have been used continuously across dynastic rule, colonial times and independence, while others have been discontinued only to reappear. The penal practices in Myanmar today continue to be deeply influenced by their history and reveal the continued presence of authoritarian ideas.

Border Governance: Reframing political transition in Myanmar

AbstractBorderlands and bordering processes are central to politics and the governance of people, goods, and territories, not only as markers of territorial-administrative control but also as practices that shape the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, mobility/immobility, and relations of power and authority. This special issue focuses on Myanmar, where political governance is deeply entangled with ethnicity, territory, borders, and bordering processes. We attempt to untangle these relationships by adopting an approach that combines consideration of how borderlands are governed with recognition of the ways in which borders, borderlands, and border populations shape governance and administration. We define this approach as ‘border governance’, by which we mean governance in, of, and through borderlands. In this introduction, we explore the meaning and significance of border governance as it relates to Myanmar, its ethnic border states, and their relations to other nations bordering the country. In doing so, we engage with and develop scholarly debates in three primary areas: (i) Borders, territoriality, and bordering processes; (ii) Plural governance and everyday bordering; (iii) Peacebuilding and the borders of transition. The articles in this special issue were written prior to the military coup of February 2021. Nevertheless, the central arguments presented here remain relevant, as does our conclusion: to achieve lasting peace in Myanmar, the borderlands must be at the centre.

Why the NLD fails to consolidate democratic transition in Myanmar

The general populace in Myanmar, as well as international observers, have expected that the National League for Democracy (NLD) would be able to consolidate democratic transition, since the latter obtained a certain degree of support from home and abroad. During the five years of the NLD administration, transition has nevertheless been in regression instead of progression. All rating agencies (Freedom House, Bertelsmann, VDem) consider that Myanmar is not yet a democracy. Freedom House's report indicates that Myanmar's status changed from ‘Partly Free’ to ‘Not Free’ in 2020. Much of the existing literature argues that this stems from the NLD having had to operate within structural constraints and agency curbs. Therefore, this article will examine why the NLD is unable to overcome these barriers, under which structural factors and what kind of agency. The article argues that, instead of structure-altering, the NLD has reinforced structural barriers without seeking any considerable leeway within the bounds of existing constraints. In the context of structure, this article will examine the transition process itself, as well as constitutional arrangements, the economic system, and the political culture. The agency context will include the behaviours of the chief executive, the Tatmadaw, and the general populace.

Institutional Reform in Myanmar: Preventing Corporate Land Rights Abuses

Abstract In 2011, after five decades of authoritarian rule, Myanmar accelerated its military-guided transition, culminating in partially democratic elections in 2015. While land reform was a central part of protest that led to governmental changes, unlawful land confiscation and forced evictions remain central obstacles to transition in Myanmar. The current government has failed to reform the legal framework, institutions, policy and practice violating Housing, Land and Property (HLP) rights. While civil society has called for participatory and accountable institutions, a perceived need to appease the military, to harness the economic power of ‘crony’ businesspeople and to attract foreign investment has left violations of HLP rights inadequately addressed. This article argues that transitional justice’s guarantees of non-reoccurrence are essential to the protection of HLP rights in Myanmar, and that the best method of preventing reoccurrence is through upholding the state duty to protect human rights by reforming laws and institutions.

Missing marriage: changing marriage patterns amid social transition in Myanmar

ABSTRACT Across Asia, men and women increasingly delay or abstain from marriage, a change often linked to improvements in female educational attainment and labour force participation. In Myanmar, less than 90 per cent of women aged 45–49 years during the 2014 census had ever married, compared to nearly all men of a similar age. This paper investigates the difference in marriage patterns between males and females in Myanmar. Using a Cox proportional hazards model, we analyse the associations between entry into marriage across age cohorts, and male and female educational attainment and workforce participation. We find that having a high level of education and currently working negatively affect women's chances of marrying across all ages. While higher education similarly affects younger men, we find that higher socioeconomic status substantially improves a man's likelihood of marriage in later life, suggesting lingering gender stereotypes influencing women to remain single in the country.

Refugee Policy as Border Governance: Refugee return, peacebuilding, and Myanmar's politics of transition

AbstractRefugees have been largely overlooked in analyses of Myanmar's transition, apparently considered peripheral to more prominent topics such as negotiation with armed groups, economic reform, and political elections. By analysing approaches to return and repatriation in three distinct contexts—refugees in camps in Thailand, Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, and Chin refugees in Malaysia and India—this article shows that proposals for the return and repatriation of refugees are a form of ‘border governance' (that is, governance in, of, and through borders). This operates at three scales: (1) global border control by keeping refugees in their region of origin or returning them to their country of origin, (2) national border control by reinforcing boundaries between Myanmar and its surrounding states, and (3) the governance of political transition by reinforcing the Myanmar government’s narrative of peacebuilding by recasting continuing conflict as conditions suitable for refugee return. Premature promotion of repatriation has a number of harmful outcomes for refugee communities: encouraging the withdrawal of international aid, escalating fear and uncertainty, and political bolstering of a Bamar-dominated government and military vis-a-vis ethnic minority groups. This analysis supports a broader understanding of repatriation and its consequences, recognising that the promotion of refugee return can have significant political implications that are apparent even before mass returns have been carried out and which may reverberate far into the future.

Boundary Making in Myanmar's Electoral Process: Where elections do not take place

AbstractThe 2015 general elections were considered a hallmark of Myanmar's transition from an authoritarian regime towards a new form of government. However, the elections did not take place in all parts of the country, and significant portions of the population were excluded from the vote, including voters in areas of contested sovereignty, those who experienced displacement by conflict, and the Rohingya. Against the background of the regulatory framework for elections in Myanmar and its electoral system, this article looks first into a particular understudied element of the electoral process—the cancellation or postponement of elections in areas affected by conflict, which is little understood by voters, election administrators, and outside observers. Second, the article examines the conditions necessary for internally displaced persons (IDPs) to participate in elections. Third, the article recapitulates the gradual legal disenfranchisement of voters and candidates who self-identified as Rohingya, which preceded their mass exodus to Bangladesh in 2017. While in 2015 all these processes of exclusion were arguably of lesser priority for the election administration, which facilitated the first credible Myanmar election in decades, they have not altered significantly since and will affect the electoral participation of disadvantaged communities again in the future.

The constitution of Myanmar: a contextual analysis

On 8 November 2020 the Myanmar (Burma) electorate once again returned to the polls, with many queuing from the early hours to participate in the third set of nationwide elections since the establishment of the 2008 constitution. Expected results at the time of writing indicate another landslide victory for Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD), a party made up of ex-political prisoners and pro-democracy activists. Nevertheless, there has been increasing scepticism about the success of Myanmar's regime transition from military dictatorship to democracy. The continuing ethnic violence in many of the borderlands, including but not limited to the persecution of the Rohingya, would appear to overshadow supposed institutional and electoral progress in the past twelve years. Yet as this book by Melissa Crouch details, the answer to the success of Myanmar's transition and democratic potential lies not in its electoral process but within its constitution. In 2008, Myanmar held a referendum on the newly drafted constitution which passed with overwhelming success despite the vote being held days after Cyclone Nargis devastated much of the central lowlands. The decision to go ahead and the result exemplified the gap between what was democratic transition on the surface and the realities of the environment in which it was occurring. As the first part of the book outlines, both the oversight and participation of the military in the drafting and securing of the 2008 constitution have not only undermined but completely restricted the process. Though the language of democracy may be used when discussing Myanmar, this detailed analysis of the constitution and of the first two elections held under its aegis in 2010 and 2015 paint a very different picture.

BOOK REVIEW: Unravelling Myanmar's Transition: Progress, Retrenchment, and Ambiguity Amidst Liberalization, edited by Pavin Chachavalpongpun, Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Patrick Strefford

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Social Media Use by Young People Living in Conflict-Affected Regions of Myanmar.

Since Myanmar's transition to civilian rule in 2011, the use of smartphones has exploded. The ubiquitous use of social media, in particular Facebook, has had a well-publicized dark side as a platform for disseminating fake news and hate speech. With poor digital literacy skills, Myanmar users are susceptible to disinformation campaigns and other online dangers, particularly young people, the most prevalent users. The current study collected benchmarking data related to usage patterns and perceptions of social media among Myanmar youth living in conflict-affected areas, including internally displaced Rohingya Muslims whose voice is yet to be captured in social media research. A total of 231 participants from Rakhine and Kayah States aged 13-35 were surveyed about their use of social media and its impact on Myanmar society and their own lives. More than half of the young people sampled were heavy smartphone users, particularly Rohingya Muslims, who rely on social media for contact with society outside of their camps. Facebook was by far the most used app, however, private group chat-based platforms were also popular. A majority said that they check the accuracy of news they read on social media, however, most do so by checking other Facebook pages or asking friends or family. Overall, most young people thought that social media has both a positive impact and negative impact on their lives. This study adds to an emerging body of research into how Myanmar youth engage with social media, particularly regarding how they consume news of current events.

Supporting National Transition in Myanmar Through Corporate Social Responsibility

Myanmar is moving rapidly in the direction of a more democratic and economically strong future. However, many challenges remain and constructive change will require the cooperation of the corporate sector. Many foreign businesses are interested in investing in Myanmar as a result of political reforms. The government could take a pivotal role, leading the agenda by setting Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) standards as a tool for social development. This paper explores how CSR could be embedded in government business strategy, how business practice could exceed public expectations, how labour laws could strengthen employee packages and benefits, and how foreign investors could be encouraged to bring CSR expertise to strengthen domestic capabilities. Finally, this paper argues that a CSR code of conduct should be imposed to ensure that business practices are tailored to national economic and social interests, and the form such a code of conduct could take.

Supporting National Transition in Myanmar with Development Assistance

Myanmar is undergoing significant political reforms and socio-political changes, which have been more rapid and broad than anticipated by most commentators. While ongoing reforms face significant obstacles and vested interests, and is far from assured, reform to date has already significantly altered the international relations of the state. From a development perspective, the growing international acceptability of the regime has begun to change donor attitudes, with development assistance rather than merely humanitarian aid now being discussed, and the conditionality attached to international assistance changing. This paper explores these changes in donor policies toward Myanmar, examining the prospects for development partnership with relevant government programs and agencies, and analysing the ways and sectors development assistance may be able to be used to strengthen the ongoing reform and national transition.

Myanmar's Transition without Justice

Myanmar’s transition towards a limited form of constitutional democracy is taking place in the absence of national measures to deal with the legacy of massive human rights abuses: without criminal prosecutions for historical crimes; without the establishment of institutions for truth-telling; without reparations. This article considers the escalation of violence against ethnic minorities during the early period of Myanmar’s democratic transition in the context of the claim that transitional justice has the potential to deter future atrocities. First, the article explains why the military, the democratic opposition, Western states, and the United Nations (UN), all accepted that Myanmar’s democratisation should proceed without the establishment of institutions and processes of transitional justice. Second, the article shows how, in the absence of transitional justice, the transitional government attempted to bolster the rule of law by conducting its own investigations into allegations of misconduct by the military and through low-level prosecutions of individual military officers, and explains why this strategy failed. Finally, the article considers the potential impact of recent efforts at the international level to establish accountability, such as the UN Human Rights Council’s establishment of an Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, the International Criminal Court (ICC) proceedings related to the crime against humanity of deportation, and the case bought by Gambia in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for Myanmar’s violation of the Genocide Convention.

Myanmar’s Top-Down Transition: Challenges for Civil Society

This article historicises the nature of political transition in Myanmar to better appreciate the challenges faced by civil society. After Myanmar’s political reforms in 2011, Western donors rushed into the country in support of what they misunderstood as a remarkable instance of democratisation. In 2019, escalating civil war, ethnic cleansing, and contracting civil liberties urge a rethink. This article argues that viewing transition in Myanmar through the lens of democratisation has always been misleading and problematic. Partial liberalisation was orchestrated by the military to safeguard its own power. Reforms have not only benefited civil society but also enabled the growth of uncivil society, fuelling sectarian violence and bolstering military rule. Operating on the assumption of democratisation, Western donors shifted funds from grass-roots networks to militarised state bureaucracies that seek to co-opt peace-building and development projects for the purposes of ethnocratic state-building and counterinsurgency. Rethinking the nature of transition is pivotal for preventing inadvertently aiding authoritarianism and conflict.

The neoliberal borderscape: Neoliberalism's effects on the social worlds of migrants along the Thai-Myanmar border

This paper discusses neoliberalism's effects on migrants in Mae Sot, a town on the Thai-Myanmar border inhabited by approximately 200,000 migrants from Myanmar. Most literature on neoliberalism and borders focuses on how borders filter between “desired” and “unwanted” mobilities in the interests of capital accumulation. This paper takes a different approach; it argues that neoliberalism reconfigures the day-to-day social realities of migrants, who are embedded in families, communities, and a larger social system along the Thai-Myanmar border. During the 1980s, when a war economy thrived along the Thai-Myanmar border, migrants in Mae Sot established a semi-legal social system comprising schools, clinics, and community organisations, that allowed migrants to access functions ordinarily provided by a state. However, Myanmar's transition to a nominally civilian government in 2010 resulted in two changes on the border. Firstly, the Thai state is implementing projects to connect Mae Sot to transcontinental transport networks. Secondly, Western donors that funded community organisations in Mae Sot began re-routing their resources to supporting in-country programmes in Myanmar. Neoliberalism is the driving force for both these phenomena. Using the concepts of bordering and borderscapes, this paper discusses their combined effects on migrant children, families, and communities. Migrant children are increasingly denied opportunities to go to school, even as their parents become more deeply integrated into the border economy. Leaders of community organisations decrease their reliance on Western donors, but increase the burdens they place on other community members. The case of the Thai-Myanmar border demonstrates that a comprehensive understanding of neoliberalism's relationship with interstate borders must consider the ways in which socio-spatial identities are produced in dynamic relation with top-down efforts to regulate interstate boundaries. Concepts of bordering and the borderscape are central to this endeavor.

Authoritarian resilience through top-down transformation: making sense of Myanmar's incomplete transition

AbstractStarting from the imperfect nature of Myanmar's democracy, this paper aims to answer two questions. First, can Myanmar's transition be defined as a case of democratization, or is it, rather, a case of authoritarian resilience? To state this differently: is the progress enjoyed by Myanmar's polity the outcome of an ongoing process that is supposed to lead to a fully fledged democracy, or, rather, an attempt to enshrine elements of authoritarian governance under a democratic guise? Second, if the balance leans towards the latter instead of the former, how did authoritarian resilience work in Myanmar? The transition is analysed from a long-term perspective, moving from the 1988 pro-democracy uprising up to the most recent events. Data were collected from available published sources and from three fieldworks conducted by the authors in Myanmar. The paper concludes that Myanmar's transition is better understood as a case of authoritarian resilience than as democratization and highlights three core traits of Myanmar's authoritarian resilience: first, the very top-down nature of the political transformation; second, the incumbents’ ability to set the pace of political reform through the use of repression and political engineering; and third, the divide-and-rule strategy used as a means to keep contestations separated and local.